Is not freedom older than Christianity?
Does the Christian recommend his religion to a Pagan by stealing his manhood and all that belongs to it?
Truly, if only Christians have a right to personal freedom, what harm is there in hunting and catching Pagans to make slaves of them?
And this was exactly the "development" of thought and doctrine in the Christian church.

The same priests who taught that _Christians_ have moral rights to their sinews and skin, to their wives and children, and to the fruit of their labour, which _Pagans_ have not, consistently developed the same fundamental idea of Christian superiority into the lawfulness of making war upon the heathen, and reducing them to the state of domestic animals.

If Christianity is to have credit from the former, it must also take the credit of the latter.

If cumulative evidence of its divine origin is found in the fact, that Christendom has liberated Christian slaves, must we forget the cumulative evidence afforded by the assumed right of the Popes to carve out the countries of the heathen, and bestow them with their inhabitants on Christian powers?
Both results flow logically out of the same assumption, and were developed by the same school.
But, I am told, a man must not be freed, until we have ascertained his capacity for self-rule! This is indeed a tyrannical assumption: _vindicioe secundum servitutem_.

Men are not to have their human rights, until we think they will not abuse them! Prevention is to be used against the hitherto innocent and injured! The principle involves all that is arrogant, violent, and intrusive, in military tyranny and civil espionage.